Governor Josh Shapiro signed Executive Order 2026-05 on Tuesday, converting Pennsylvania’s voluntary data center standards into a mandatory gate on every future project in the state. “My message to data center developers is clear: if you can’t agree to our strict requirements and gain community approval, you’re not going to have the Commonwealth’s support,” Shapiro said.
State agencies count more than 100 data center proposals surfacing in public databases. Only 58 have engaged the Department of Environmental Protection at any level of formality, only 15 have applied for a single permit, and only five projects hold every permit needed to begin building.
It replaces incentive with obligation. Shapiro’s original GRID standards, unveiled in his March budget address, offered developers expedited Fast Track permitting in exchange for voluntarily meeting environmental, transparency and labor commitments. A GOP-controlled Senate never codified them. The executive order drops the trade entirely: every data center project is removed from Fast Track, with no future projects eligible, and developers must instead sign a binding Consent Order and Agreement committing to the same requirements before permit review even begins. Operators must report energy and water use to the state annually, nondisclosure agreements with the Commonwealth are barred, and DEP will publish a public map tracking every project in its pipeline. The Department of Revenue is updating the state’s data center tax exemption program to require the same compliance, an escalation from the bank letters of credit utilities elsewhere have started demanding before they will even study a connection request.
Shapiro spent last year promoting Amazon’s planned $20 billion campus across sites in Salem Township and Falls Township as a jobs win, the kind of project Fast Track was built to wave through. The order does not cancel that project, but Amazon and every developer after it now need local buy-in the state can no longer purchase with a faster permit.
Pennsylvania is not acting alone. New York capped large new data centers with a one-year moratorium in July. Texas, facing an estimated 474 gigawatts of proposed grid connections from developers, roughly five times the state’s record peak demand, froze new approvals on August 3 until regulators can audit the backlog. All three orders arrived within six weeks of each other, from governors of both parties.
The GRID standards themselves remain unchanged from what Shapiro proposed in March. What changed is that developers no longer get to choose whether to follow them.
Sources: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Spotlight PA
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team